Content missing error

Oh my. No new posts since last year... Apologies!

In lieu of real content, in case you missed it, I reviewed the Mac mini with Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" Server on RegHardware last month...

Current wrangling involves trying to get FreeBSD to play nice dual-booting with Ubuntu (failing, so far) and wondering if I can resurrect my old static website by importing it into Drupal somehow. Anyone who wishes to volunteer Drupal advice would be very welcome and plied with $BEER.

Also, where's the best place to buy dead cheap blank CDRs or DVD-Rs these days?

HTC Desire HD - pros & cons

Repurposed comment I just left on El Reg.

I noticed today that RegHardware ran a review of the Desire HD, the device that finally swayed me into abandoning Symbian and going for Android. Here is my response...

I've had one since October and overall I like it.

The battery life is appalling - it lasts about six hours in normal use, which I do not regard as heavy. It's the first charge-twice-a-day phone I've owned; I now constantly carry a spare battery and a USB charging cable.

It really would benefit from simple cursor and select keys and make/end call buttons - both for ease, precision and for use with gloves, for instance. You lose the onscreen cursor keys with Swype or any other enhanced keyboard; even with these tools, text entry and editing is infuriating, slow and painful. Entering more than a short paragraph makes me shout at the device in rage.

Those whinging about its size are munchkins, hobbits or something. The Desire HD is too small, if anything! A phone should reach from ear to mouth; this thing is a good inch-plus shorter than its predecessor, a Nokia E90, and HTC's battery is just laughably tiny.

It would benefit a lot from being two to three centimetres longer with some of the extra space used for just a few physical buttons. It also really needs to be twice as thick, with a big slab of detachable battery on the back - it needs something like 3500mAh to be usable as a smartphone all day. By which I mean calls, email, social networks, GPS, some music playback, occasional Web use, etc. Even with spare batteries I daren't listen to music or run the instant-messaging client on mine - it would die in a few hours.

Of course, then the little tiny people with their little tiny child hands and tiny miniature pockets would whine - but sod them, they have an abundance of microscopic kiddie-sized hairdressers' phones to play with. Let 'em whinge.

Better still, a slide-out keyboard on a phone with a screen this big - or bigger. An Acer Liquid Metal with a half-decent keyboard and a 3500-4000mAh battery would be ideal.

But no, oompaloompas rule the mobile-phone world these days, so even we proper man-sized actual adults are cursed with phones designed for infant People Of Restricted Growth.

For comparison, my* old HTC Universal, with a third party extended battery of ±3800mAh, could last for about two and a half days on a charge. Go to work Friday morning, go away for the weekend and it was still running when you got back to the office on Monday morning and could charge it. That is a credible battery life. The Desire HD's is a joke. Yes, it was an inch and a half thick and weighed about 400g, but it was totally worth it.

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* Well, dougs's, really. Tragically stolen. I owe him.